De Fem

De Fem

Sculpture / Performance

Myths, WAAP, Vancouver, 2018.

Myths brings together work by five artists who, through sculpture, video, performance, and photo-based work, reflect on questions related to medium and myth. Working materially and conceptually, the artists are absorbed in questions of history, material, touch, contact, and the body, creating new materialist feminist folklore. Through light, matter, and tactility, these artists stir a return to aesthetics in its etymological sense of the sensorial—the feeling—in contrast to the more distanced mythologies that drive art and its histories.

From Brener’s new materialist feminist armour and Hill-Carroll’s defamiliarized renderings of Lucretia, to Rasmussen and Siebens’s embodied re-engaging of mythical art world figures and Kreye’s supple staging of Dionysian rituals, Myths brings together contemporary feminist practices that feel their way through issues related to mythology and myth-making. In place of the distantiating, even violent or violating, myths of philosophy and art history, we find a close engagement with materials, contemplative reflection, collective performance, and ebbing, vibratory touch. Holding tension between softness and strength, these works evidence subtle intimacies between the artists and their mediums through practices that, across media, resonate sculpturally against site, time, the political, and the aesthetic.

– Text  by Lauren Fournier
Read, “Myths,” full essay by Lauren Fournier